Our goal for this course is to explore what it takes to develop a formal typology of discourse markers and other “units of language” that serve in managing linguistic interaction. We will take a syntactic approach as it is – in my view – the most suitable approach to achieve this goal.

The first lecture introduces the relevant background.  (Slides)

i) What is a sentence? The classic unit of analysis for syntactic (and semantic) theory is the sentence (and the proposition). Many of the discourse markers we investigate are often analysed as being “outside of the clause”. Hence it is crucial to know what we mean when we talk about “the sentence”.

ii) How do sentences change in interaction? When embedded in a conversation, sentences involve (often obligatorily) little words, particles, or other means (like sentence intonation) to manage the ongoing interaction.

iii) Speech act theory. One of the ways in which units discourse markers have been incorporated into syntactic structure in recent years is by means of “syntacticizing speech acts” it is necessary to give an overview of the core insights of speech act theory. We will focus on the observation that speech act theory is mainly concerned with the “active” aspect of language, and not so much with the “interactive aspect”. Most approaches towards the syntacticization of speech acts inherit this problem.

iv) The syntacticization of speech acts…dates back to Ross 1970 (“On declaratives”). The key insight in this seminal paper is that all sentences are performative in that we do things with everything we say, including simple declaratives. It is argued that declaratives are embedded in a silent speech act structure (“I tell you that”). While the particular version of this proposal has been abandoned along with the death of generative semantics it has more recently been revised. Specifically, the advent of functional categories that define the clausal architecture has been expanded to include functional projections that can be characterized as “speech act categories”. We review these proposals and identify problems with them. The key problem being that they all ignore the interactive dimension of language, focussing mainly on the active aspect of speech acts.

v) From speech acts to interaction. To integrate the missing interactive aspect of language into the functional architecture it is necessary to introduce – however briefly – what is know about linguistic interaction and how to model it.